Sunday, November 24, 2013

The Value of Q&A Sessions with Top Operations Researchers from Industry

Last Friday, we had the pleasure and honor of hosting Dr. Mary E. Helander of IBM Yorktown Heights at the Isenberg School of Management through our UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter. I help the students to organize chapter activities and since Dr. Helander wanted to visit us, we decided to do something a bit different. The event was so successful that one of the students present said afterwards: "Professor Nagurney we have to have more of these Q&A sessions!"

Amazingly, it was almost entirely a female audience!Dr. Helander told the students that they could ask her ANY question.

First, some background on Dr. Helander. She is on the program committee of the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research that will take place in Boston next spring. She is a Master Inventor and Research Scientist and is currently the IBM Research Division leader for Consumer Products. Presently, she is the technical lead for two interdisciplinary research projects involving food safety and traceability. Not only does she hold a PhD in Operations Research but she is also a Docent in Quality and Software Engineering from Linkoping University in Sweden. At lunch she and I talked about living in Sweden and she told me some mesmerizing stories about her surname -- I'll let you do the research -- another movie should be made.

The Edelman Award is like an Academy Award for analytics and operations research, so although her team did not win to be a finalist is a huge achievement!

From Mary we learned a lot about IBM, and about her research and contributions there. We learned about functional foods and microtoxins and my favorite takeaway and quote from the Q&A session.

Mary said: People that you work with will bring you joy.

Frankly, I think that it is Dr. Mary Helander who is making such a positive impact on all those around her and beyond through her great operations research contributions and dynamic personality, which the students really appreciated!

Thank you so much, Dr. Mary Helander, for coming to the Isenberg School at UMass Amherst!You are an operations research rockstar!

About Me

is the John F. Smith Memorial Professor of Operations Management at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College at Oxford University for the 2016 Trinity term.
She was a Visiting Professor at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden for 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015.
Her latest book, co-edited with I. Kotsireas and P.M. Pardalos is: Dynamics of Disasters: Key Concepts, Models, Algorithms, and Insights, published by Springer in 2016. She is also the co-author of the book: Competing on Supply Chain Quality: A Network Economics Perspective, with D. Li, and published in 2016.
She is the author of the book: Networks Against Time: Supply Chain Network Analytics for Perishable Products, co-authored with M. Yu, A.H. Masoumi, and L.S. Nagurney.
She is also the author, with Q. Qiang, of the book: Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World, and several other books.
She is the Founding Director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks.